Latin Asian Entanglements: Critical Studies

(Roundtable / In-Person)

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Special Session
Multiethnic and Indigenous / Cultural Studies

John Ribo (Central Washington University)
jdri@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

While recent ICE raids throughout the United States affect both Latinx and Asian communities, a recent study by UCLA’s Center for Neighborhood Knowledge shows that Latinxs accounted for nine of ten ICE arrests in the first six months of Trump’s second presidency. This latest iteration of American mass deportation thus urgently requires Latin Asian solidarities capable of responding to such disparities. For PAMLA 2026 we propose a special session featuring scholars exploring Latin Asian entanglements. In Entanglements, Or Transmedial Thinking about Capture (2012), Rey Chow invites readers to consider how entanglement describes relations that emerge not just from shared experience or physical and psychological contact but also through difference and division (1-2). We therefore choose entanglement as a key term not only to describe the messy and uneven incoherence of the current conjuncture but also to signal that neither identity nor solidarity are ever foregone conclusions.

On June 26, 2025, Melissa Gomez’s LA Times article, “Asian American leaders urge their communities to stand by Latinos, denounce ICE raids,” repeatedly emphasized that Latinxs are ICE’s primary target. In October 2025, UCLA’s Center for Neighborhood Knowledge published “Latino ICE Arrests Surge Under Trump,” a study that reinforces ICE’s targeting of Latinx communities stating that “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data during the first six months of President Trump’s second administration finds that Latinos [...] made up about nine in 10 ICE arrests” (2). Thus while recent ICE raids throughout the United States affect all immigrants and people of color, and although Latinx and Asian American communities are among those most directly targeted, this latest iteration of American mass incarceration and deportation urgently requires Latin Asian solidarities capable of responding to how brazenly the regime’s current policies and actions disproportionately target Latinx communities.

For PAMLA 2026 we therefore propose two linked special sessions featuring the work of scholars, artists, and activists exploring Latin Asian entanglements. We choose entanglement as a key term not only to describe the messy and uneven incoherence of the current conjuncture but also to signal that neither identity nor solidarity are ever foregone conclusions. In Entanglements, Or Transmedial Thinking about Capture (2012), Rey Chow invites readers to consider how entanglement describes relations that emerge not just from shared experience or physical and psychological contact but also through difference and division (1-2). Chow’s provocation seems particularly timely today in a national dynamic driven by terrorizing strategies designed to flood the zone and divide and conquer. In fact, she challenges us to think beyond politically progressive teleologies to account for “embodied states of captivity, including the intangible but phenomenologically registered effects of enchantment, subordination, unevenness, vulnerability, desperation, servitude, and deprivation of existential autonomy—in short, all the basic issues of terror and freedom, and (often sadomasochistic) pleasure and pain that, in refracted manners, surface in art and fiction” (12). Our panels center notions of Latin Asian entanglement and solidarity as a means through which to theorize and reimagine structures of class, culture, and power that arise in the face of these moments of violence and conflict.